About this column

Steve Chapple’s Intellectual Capital covers game-changing people, ideas and perspectives. His columns, which appear once a month in the U-T business section, are entertaining visits with some of the smartest minds around San Diego. Contact him at intellectualcapitalchapple@gmail.com.

One of the tricks in business (as in life) is to turn your vices into virtues. And there is perhaps no greater vice among today’s technically adept youth than video gaming.

Grant Farwell, 24, the new CEO of Barc, a social networking play that soft-launched last week at San Diego’s downtown incubator EvoNexus, was one such demon gamer.

He was enthralled, obsessed, if not addicted, to World of Warcraft, the massive multi-player online game in which teams of subscribers unite to take down neon monsters. (Grant’s avatar was “Purple,” a mage of magical powers.)

WOW generates an astounding billion dollars a year for Activision-Blizzard, but often drives the parents and spouses of its 10 million paid users bat-crazy with worry and annoyance.

Grant’s dad, Tony Farwell, 56, the La Jolla Internet maven behind

Closing.com, (a real estate pricing service for banks and professionals); TV Data Technologies, Hollywood Media, Farwell Capital, and STATS, the largest provider of independent sports data, at one point engineered a hiatus from gaming for son Grant in a Swiss boarding school with, presumably, terribly poor Internet access.

But Grant had learned much about web communication, leading his team into the far caverns of Azeroth, as well as picking up some lean executive skills.

Now son and father have joined forces to create the concept of “social web browsing.” Barc — “your dashboard into the Internet” — will soon allow you to post, share and chat in real time as you hover your “Barc Spot” over any website — a live Charger’s or Padre’s web-stream on ESPN, this newspaper’s website

(UTSanDiego.com), the White House, Starbucks, anywhere your cursor takes you — like a floating halo, a legally-allowed, plugged in, intergalactic aggregator. (Barc stands for Browser Assisted Relay Chat.) If this sounds kind of like a big idea — The Next Big Thing, in fact, with maybe some large fren-emies out there (can you Tweet FB?) — that’s exactly how the Farwells, fils et pere, see it.

Grant grabs his mouse and moves it with the rapidity of the champion competitive speed gamer he is on weekends. The website of U-T San Diego pops up on the wall-mount flat-screen to the right of his desk.

We see the main webpage. Fires are burning down Colorado. Barc’s Spot sits above the U-T like a friendly flying saucer. Any Barcsters reading the website can now talk to each other. They can see where they are “in” the news site, sports page or Colorado fires, and they can also see what other websites their friends are on outside the paper’s site. If there happen to be 100 people in Barc reading the U-T, they can do instant polls with instant ranking and filters. If 100,000 Barcsters around the world are watching the World Cup, this ranking and filtering becomes an important technological point. A website like the U-T’s or that of a major hotel or a Starbucks can have Barc embedded (currently for free,) and then all visitors, whether registered to Barc or not, can be on the Barc platform, which allows videos and links to be posted, with locations of friends sited, and polls taken.

The poll part holds added commercial potential. Let’s say you’re looking at the new AXE deodorant commercial or maybe the ad for the new iPad. You can talk and rank, and the company (presumably for a fee, at least later) can get instant feedback.

Barc is designed to treat users’ privacy with kid gloves, however, no secret tailing. You can publicly follow others, a reporter in the case of a news organization, for instance, or a celebrity, not unlike Twitter.

Barc users can also congregate over a virtual location that may not allow access, the Goldman Sachs site, for instant. “(Writer) Matt Taibbi calls Goldman a vampire squid in Rolling Stone, and 1,000 college students can hover over Goldman’s site,” explains Grant, and debate the merits of the appellation. “It’s like being on a sidewalk looking into the building.”

“The ability to dynamically interact with others who are on the same site doesn’t really exist now,” says Tony. “There is no ability to share information live and interactively with others who are on the same page. That’s a very important new step on the Internet. How we interact with each other. How we share. We do this in the physical life when we are in line at a store, a movie theater, a carwash, at a Chargers game, but we haven’t been able to interact with each other quite like that on the Internet — until now.”

Tony Farwell thinks newspapers and television will be natural spots for Barc to take off. Grant thinks sporting events will be the first major markets. Both believe Barc will provide an interactive platform for people congregating in a wi-fi location such as a college dorm, a hotel or a large Starbucks. People can watch/comment on the same game or show without being in the same room.

Grant’s “Aha Moment” came when he noticed that networking sites were first installing bars along their borders. “I was like, ‘Oh, everyone is trying to implement bars so that people can interact with other people, so why not have a single one where you can interact with everyone on any website at the same time?”